Self-Hosted Infrastructure Exploration

condensed from conversations with Claude

Git Hosting

Forgejo — preferred over Gitea (active fork post-licensing drama); single binary, GitHub-style UI
Woodpecker CI integrates cleanly for build/deploy pipelines

Zola — single Rust binary, Tera templating (Jinja2-like), built-in Sass, zola serve for local dev with live reload
- Hey I did this one. https://chththall.fyi is built with Zola
Supports YAML front matter (---) so existing posts migrate without touching front matter
- yeah that was false, still had to add front matter, and while at it changed most of it to TOML
CommonMark is close to Pandoc Markdown; enable smart_punctuation and footnotes in config.toml
zola build outputs to public/ — deploy via rsync or CI
- deployed via Cloudflare workers
Quartz for Digital Cellar zk
End state: Forgejo repo → Woodpecker CI → rsync to Caddy-served directory
- Probably should still set up Forgejo

Interim: Cloudflare Pages (free tier, 500 builds/month, global CDN, zero ops) — good bridge before VPS
Long term: Hetzner VPS + Caddy (auto HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt, minimal config)
Once VPS exists, serve Zola site directly from Caddy — two extra lines in Caddyfile

May not need VPS depending on what I want to do. 2026-07-27: VPS tabled for now CF working fine

Tailscale — WireGuard-based private mesh between devices; learn this first
Headscale — self-hosted coordination server, drop-in replacement for Tailscale’s centralized piece; migrate once VPS exists
Natural order: Tailscale → Headscale when VPS is up
Cloudflare Tunnel — punches through firewall for public-facing services without opening ports

Syncthing — P2P encrypted file sync, pairs with Tailscale for private transport
iOS client: Möbius Sync (paid, most functional option)
Use case: keeping ~/Documents/Repos/knowledge_library/ synced across devices
iOS is low priority for now; revisit if needed

description	—
created	2026-06-27 23:15:53
updated	2026-08-14
tags	infrastructure, self-hosting, linux, status/draft